If you go into any large electrical retailer nowadays, you will be faced with a barrage of acronyms and seemingly meaningless numbers. Many of the TVs on display will have stickers on them proclaiming that they are HD Ready, 4K or In-Built DVR/Freeview.

What is 4K?

Many TV screens today are labelled as 4K, but what does this mean? Also known as Ultra-HD, 4K screens have a resolution that is approximately four times that of an HD TV. The display of a 4K television consists of about eight million pixels.

WCG is one of the most recent acronyms to appear and is short for Wide Colour Gamut. A colour gamut is simply the range of colours that can be displayed and relates directly to the spectrum of colours that can be seen by the human eye. It is a key part of High Dynamic Range (HDR) colour – which is what gives the best 4K TVs their enhanced colour.

The WCG represents all the possible colours of a colour gamut that a 4K TV can display. The larger the colour gamut, the more colours can be displayed, and the better and more realistic the picture. According to 4K.com, it is vital to note that both the content and display need to be compatible with the WCG in order for it to be viewed as intended. You can’t view in WCG all the time as some TVs are not able to process the technology even if the streaming service is sending WCG content.

How is the new different from the old?

Many of the older 4K TVs will have a Standard Dynamic Range display (usually labelled as SDR 4K). SDR has 8-bit colour as opposed to 10-bit colour that you find on the latest HDR models. In terms of colour, the latest 10-bit models can display over a billion colours compared to approximately 16 million on an SDR version.